City of Winter Park Planning & Zoning Board — April 28, 2026 (Work Session)

Meeting Overview

Type: Work Session (midday, non-action) Quorum: Yes (6 of 7 members present) Duration: 74 minutes (12:00 p.m. – 1:14 p.m.) Location: Chapman Room, 401 S. Park Avenue

Attendance

• Present: Alex Stringfellow, David Bornstein, Jason Johnson (Chair), Bill Segal, Charles Steinberg, Michael Dick
• Absent: Vashon Sarkisian
• Staff Present: Allison McGillis (Director of Planning & Zoning), John Harbilas (Asst. Director of Planning & Zoning / Zoning Official), Nicholas Lewis (Planner II), Corinna Lundgren (Planner I). Also appearing: Charles Ramdatt (Public Works Director), Jason Sartorio (Transportation Planner)

Agenda Items

Item 1: 860 W. Fairbanks Avenue — revised plans after the April 7 tabling

• Type: Conditional Use (revisions to a tabled item)
• Case Number: [not restated in the work session minutes]
• Location: 860 West Fairbanks Avenue, with frontage/streetscape work on Holt Avenue
• Applicant: [developer not named in the work session minutes]
• Request: Review of revised architectural and streetscape plans responding to the board's April 7, 2026 table.
• Current Zoning: C-3 within the Orange Avenue Overlay (OAO)
• Staff Recommendation: [carried to a later hearing]
• Action: No action — work-session discussion
• Notable Discussion: The April 7 table was to allow additional building articulation and a Holt Avenue streetscape plan. The revised submittal adds 13 parallel parking spaces along Holt Avenue, dimensioned to preserve a nine-foot sidewalk and an eight-foot landscape buffer. Articulation was improved by recessing the middle sections of the larger buildings to break the facade; smaller buildings kept their original articulation to avoid awkward tenant spaces. Overall building width is 61 feet against an OAO requirement of articulation every 36 feet — the design balances the code standard against usable tenant depth.

Item 2: Traffic concerns — Fairbanks / Denning / Kentucky

• Type: Transportation policy discussion (non-action)
• Location: Kentucky Avenue west of 860 W. Fairbanks Avenue; Holt Avenue; the Denning Drive / Fairbanks Avenue intersection
• Action: No action — work-session discussion
• Notable Discussion: Neighbors raised congestion concerns and proposed closing Holt Avenue; the board rejected the closure. A revised proposal to make Holt Avenue right-in / right-out — barring southbound left turns onto Denning Drive — was questioned as potentially ineffective and likely to displace traffic onto Orange Avenue and other streets. Public Works Director Charles Ramdatt and Transportation Planner Jason Sartorio identified Denning and Fairbanks as one of the city's most challenging intersections because it lacks dedicated left-turn lanes, producing significant backups. The city is actively negotiating with FDOT to acquire property to build left-turn lanes at that intersection, and signal timing is under review. City-collected data contradicts residents' perception of morning congestion: backups occur primarily in the evening. Staff committed to ongoing traffic studies including license plate surveys to characterize cut-through patterns, and to share findings with stakeholders. The 13 new Holt Avenue parking spaces were viewed as a traffic-calming asset — narrowing the perceived street width to discourage cut-through use.

Item 3: Preview — Conditional Use for a car wash at Aloma Avenue and Lander Road (heard May 5 as CU #26-03, El Car Wash)

• Type: Conditional Use (preview)
• Case Number: [not stated in the work session minutes; heard one week later as CU #26-03]
• Location: Aloma Avenue at Lander Road, on two parcels previously occupied by a bank and a self-service car wash (2011 Aloma Avenue / 416 Lander Road per the May 5, 2026 record)
• Applicant: [not named in the work session minutes; El Car Wash Florida, LLC per the May 5, 2026 record]
• Request: Conditional use approval for a car wash on commercially zoned parcels bordering a single-family residential neighborhood.
• Current Zoning: Commercial [specific district not stated]
• Acreage: [not stated]
• Staff Recommendation: [carried to a later hearing]
• Action: No action — work-session discussion
• Notable Discussion: Concerns identified: cut-through traffic, noise pollution, stormwater. Applicant mitigations presented: preserve two significant live oaks; six-foot concrete wall with a ten-foot landscape buffer along the residential boundary; driveway access restricted to right-in / left-out; operating hours ending at 8 p.m. with non-essential lighting off at the same time; 17 parking spaces and 16 vacuum stations; a condition requiring employees to park on-site; underground stormwater systems with a naturalized pond. The board pressed on vehicle stacking at peak and the risk of illegal turns, and on continuous understory planting along the residential buffer for visual and noise screening. The applicant's required community meeting drew limited attendance; staff folded neighbor feedback into the conditions.

Item 4: Preview — lot split in the Virginia Heights East Historic District (Stirling Avenue at Glencoe Road)

• Type: Lot split with variance (preview)
• Case Number: [not stated in the work session minutes; the May 5, 2026 docket carried SUB #26-01 at 210 Stirling Avenue in the same historic district, applicant William R. Prather, withdrawn — the correspondence is inferred from location and description, not stated in either record]
• Location: Corner lot at Stirling Avenue and Glencoe Road, Virginia Heights East Historic District
• Applicant: [not named in the work session minutes]
• Request: Split a corner lot to preserve the existing historic home and detached garage while creating a new buildable lot behind it; requires a lot-width variance and acquisition of additional land from a neighboring property to meet area requirements.
• Current Zoning: [not stated — within the Virginia Heights East Historic District]
• Staff Recommendation: [carried to a later hearing; conditions discussed include Historic Preservation Board approval and a size cap on the new home]
• Action: No action — work-session discussion
• Notable Discussion: The board debated the interpretation of the Comprehensive Plan and zoning code on lot-split variances: whether both lot area and lot width must meet median neighborhood standards, or only the dimension for which the variance is sought. Members expressed discomfort with the panhandle-shaped lot extension used to satisfy the area requirement. The applicant intends to preserve the historic home intact, including pool and detached structures, which drives the lot geometry. Conditions discussed would require Historic Preservation Board approval and limit the size of the new home to fit neighborhood character.

Public Hearings Summary

[Not applicable — work session. No public hearings, no public comment taken.]

Key Signals

• The Denning/Fairbanks left-turn-lane acquisition is the infrastructure unlock behind Winter Park's most active commercial redevelopment node. Public Works named the intersection as one of the city's worst and confirmed the city is negotiating with FDOT to acquire property for dedicated left-turn lanes. Every project in this corridor — 860 W. Fairbanks, the former RV dealership parcels at Fairbanks and Denning, the Holler/Orlando RV site approved May 5 — is being reviewed against an intersection the city already knows is failing and is already spending to fix. For anyone modeling the corridor: the entitlements are arriving ahead of the capacity fix, and the mitigation being extracted from developers (donated right-of-way for the Fairbanks turn lane) is the city's funding mechanism.
• The board refused a street closure and got parallel parking instead — a live example of Winter Park choosing calming over restriction. Neighbors asked to close Holt Avenue; the board declined, and then declined the fallback right-in/right-out on the reasoning that it would displace rather than reduce traffic. What it accepted was 13 on-street parking spaces that narrow the perceived roadway. Staff's data also cut against the residents' premise — backups are an evening phenomenon, not a morning one. Winter Park is resolving neighborhood traffic complaints with measurement and geometry rather than access restrictions, which sets the expectation for the next corridor project's neighbor negotiation.
• The car wash walked through this work session with staff's full mitigation package intact and was denied 6-0 seven days later — the clearest evidence in the corpus that a Winter Park work session does not predict the vote. The Aloma/Lander proposal previewed here is CU #26-03, El Car Wash Florida, LLC, heard May 5, 2026. The mitigations rehearsed at this table — six-foot wall with a ten-foot landscape buffer, 8 p.m. close with non-essential lighting off, right-in/left-out access, employees parked on-site, two live oaks preserved, naturalized stormwater pond — became staff's recommended conditions of approval. The board denied it anyway, unanimously, on compatibility, front-tower height, cut-through traffic, and the absence of site-specific traffic and noise studies. Nine residents spoke in opposition at the hearing; nobody spoke at this work session, because work sessions take no public comment. The concessions were negotiated in a room the neighbors were not in, and they did not survive the room the neighbors were in. This is the corpus's first car-wash denial and a bellwether-gas-station exhibit: the auto-oriented use that locates a city's compatibility line.
• Winter Park's board reads historic-district lot splits as harder than lakefront additions, and applicants are learning to withdraw rather than lose. The Stirling/Glencoe split previewed here — preserve the historic home, carve a buildable lot behind it, use a panhandle extension to hit the area minimum — drew explicit board discomfort with the panhandle geometry and an unresolved argument over whether median-neighborhood compatibility applies to both lot area and lot width or only the dimension varied. The May 5 docket carried SUB #26-01 at 210 Stirling Avenue in the same historic district, and the applicant withdrew it. Read alongside the March 3 approval of the 436 N. Knowles split and the Commission's March 25 reversal of it, the pattern is that Winter Park's split pipeline is failing at three different stages — board, Commission, and voluntary withdrawal — for the same unresolved rule.
• Winter Park's lot-split rule has a definitional hole, and this is the meeting where it is first named out loud. Does a lot-split variance have to satisfy median neighborhood standards on both area and width, or only on the dimension being varied? The board could not answer it here. That same ambiguity produced the 6-1 approval and Commission reversal at 436 N. Knowles in March. At the June 30, 2026 work session the board finally directed staff to revise the comprehensive plan policy so compatibility is measured against the specific variance type. April 28 is where the defect surfaces; June 30 is where the fix is ordered; the amendment package has not yet been adopted. Anyone holding a Winter Park lot that only splits with a variance is exposed to whichever reading the board applies on the night.
• Historic preservation is being priced as the cost of subdivision — and the board will accept that trade only when the house actually survives. Here a lot split is justified by preserving the historic home, gated on Historic Preservation Board approval and a size cap on the new house. Five weeks later, staff proposed exactly that structure as the city-wide alternative policy for lakefront splits at 1020 Palmer, and the board rejected it 4-2 in favor of the applicant's ungated text. The distinguishing fact was the applicant's structural engineering report concluding the Merrywood house could not be saved. Winter Park will trade density for preservation; it will not trade density for a preservation obligation the applicant has demonstrated is impossible.

Raw Notes

• Source platform note: Harvested from the April 28, 2026 PZB Work Session agenda (fileId 6034) and approved Minutes (fileId 6104) — CivicClerk winterparkfl tenant, agendaId 1466, event 2749.
• The published agenda listed two bullets only: "Traffic concerns surrounding Fairbanks/Denning/Kentucky" and "Upcoming agenda items." The car wash and Stirling/Glencoe lot split appear only in the minutes, under "upcoming agenda items."
• The minutes do not name the applicants for the car wash or the Stirling/Glencoe lot split and carry no case numbers for either. Both identifications above are drawn from the May 5, 2026 minutes (2026-05-meeting-PZB.md), not from this document.
• Downstream dispositions at the May 5, 2026 regular meeting: CU #26-03 (El Car Wash, 2011 Aloma Ave / 416 Lander Rd, El Car Wash Florida, LLC, attorney McGregor Love) denied 6-0; SUB #26-01 (210 Stirling Avenue, William R. Prather) withdrawn by the applicant. The 860 W. Fairbanks item — carried in the corpus as the Holler/Orlando RV conditional use — was approved 6-0 at that same meeting after the concessions rehearsed here.
• Meeting structure: Meeting Called to Order → Discussion Item(s) → Adjournment. Recording secretary: Mary Jean.
• This session appears in the corpus as backfill — the June 2026 sweep skipped it. Its Minutes file was published after that sweep ran.